HF-PMIPv6: An enhanced fast handovers for network-based mobility management

Network-based mobility management overcomes the weakness of current host-based mobility management such as Mobile Node (MN) modification, signaling overhead and handover latency. In network-based mobility management, Fast Handovers for Proxy Mobile IPv6 (F-PMIPv6) improves packet loss for PMIPv6. However, in the F-PMIPv6 reactive mode, an MN performs handover before setting up a tunnel between the serving Mobile Access Gateway (i.e., P-MAG) and the target MAG (i.e., N-MAG). The P-MAG cannot forward the packets to the N-MAG without the tunnel and thus these packets are dropped by the P-MAG during handover. Moreover, the N-MAG establishes a tunnel to the P-MAG after the MN performs handover. The tunnel establishment increases the handover latency, the signaling cost and the tunnel transmission cost. To solve the above issues, we propose a Hybrid-mode Fast Handovers for PMIPv6 (HF-PMIPv6) mechanism. HF-PMIPv6 utilizes a decision table to detect the mobility mode (i.e., predictive or reactive). If the mobility mode is predictive, like F-PMIPv6, HF-PMIPv6 establishes a tunnel between the P-MAG and the N-MAG to prevent packet loss. On the contrary (i.e., in the reactive mode), HF-PMIPv6 performs handover directly without setting up a tunnel to reduce the extra handover latency, the signaling cost and the tunnel transmission cost. Since HF-PMIPv6 has the same performance as F-PMIPv6 in predictive mode, we evaluate the performance of HF-PMIPv6 and F-PMIPv6 in reactive mode in terms of the handover latency, the signaling cost and the packet delivery cost.